Multi-point displacement monitoring of bridges using a vision-based approach

To overcome the drawbacks of the traditional contact-type sensor for structural displacement measurement, the vision-based technology with the aid of the digital image processing algorithm has received increasing concerns from the community of structural health monitoring (SHM). The advanced vision-based system has been widely used to measure the structural displacement of civil engineering structures due to its overwhelming merits of non-contact, long-distance, and high-resolution. However, seldom currently-available vision-based systems are capable of realizing the synchronous structural displacement measurement for multiple points on the investigated structure. In this paper, the method for vision-based multi-point structural displacement measurement is presented. A series of moving loading experiments on a scale arch bridge model are carried out to validate the accuracy and reliability of the vision-based system for multi-point structural displacement measurement. The structural displacements of five points on the bridge deck are measured by the vision-based system and compared with those obtained by the linear variable differential transformer (LVDT). The comparative study demonstrates that the vision-based system is deemed to be an effective and reliable means for multi-point structural displacement measurement.